Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter 16

She woke up again with her left ankle tied to a bedpost.

It was the upstairs room in the inn, the bed further from the door, which at least let her know the building probably wasn't in imminent danger of collapse from Sephiroth throwing half-ton jugs at it. The lamp on the side table had fallen over, but the floor wasn't slanting, so the structure must be more or less okay.

No hint of daylight was showing through the curtains, so she'd been out at least two hours, but less than twelve. She felt remarkably, ridiculously alert for having passed out from injury—like she'd had a ten-hour nap on top of the healing, which her body was informing her emphatically had not happened, and it would really like to get a great deal more rest now please.

But she knew, without having to try, that she couldn't. Getting back to sleep was not happening in the near future.

Ah, and she recognized that taste at the back of her tongue. Someone had used a Hyper on her to get her moving.

She checked around the room, and there was the Someone. To very little surprise, it was Fair, seated at the round table down past the foot of the bed she was tied to. She'd have known immediately if it was Cloud or Sephiroth in the room with her, but as expansive a personality as Fair was, he wasn't a glaringly obvious presence when he was sitting quietly.

Come to think of it, was Cloud still like that? Or was that something he'd…gotten from Sephiroth? Ugh, bad thoughts.

Fair raised his head, sensing her looking, or more likely hearing the rustle of her hair against the pillow they'd been generous enough to leave her. His smile was a little strained as he stood. He placed his Buster Sword on his back in the same motion, like a reflex. "Hey there. Feeling any better?"

"It would be hard not to," said Tifa. She'd had temporary deaths less physically traumatic than the combination of shock and blood loss that had made her pass out.

"Point. So, here we are."

Tifa sat up as the SOLDIER approached her, even though she'd rather not. Her head throbbed once, then subsided to a low, steady ache. Sitting up did let her get out a little of the buzzing nervous energy from the stimulant, which was good, and it put the two of them a little more at a level.

More so, as Fair rounded the end of her bed and sunk down on the other one, facing her. The sword was left leaning against the foot of the bed, only barely in his reach and not quite in hers, even if she crawled to the limit of her rope and stretched her body across the gap between the begs.

He let his knees splay apart, propped his elbows on them and laced his hands together, sitting forward attentively but not enough that his elbows or shoulders bowed in, or his neck took a predatory angle. Disarming. Friendly.

Between her and the door.

"I'm not mad," he said. "Just so you know. You really pack a punch for such a little thing!"

"I'm not short," Tifa grouched. She was taller than Cloud! And Cloud was only sort of small for a man. It wasn't their fault they'd made friends with a bunch of giants. "You're just enormous. But I'm glad you're not holding a grudge about me beating you twice."

"I was going easy on you!" he protested, which to be fair was true, especially the first time. And he hadn't been expecting her to have materia, the second.

"A win's a win."

"Anyway," Fair said, brushing the whole question of who had beaten whom aside like cobwebs, "I know you don't like Shinra, but now that you're stuck working with us can we try to get along? I'm a pretty likeable guy. And Sephiroth…isn't that bad. He healed you up himself!"

Tifa grimaced. "I can tell."

"Huh?"

"The bone's not quite mended. Everything's in the right place and sticking, and the bleed's all sorted, but if I strain the leg it'll come apart again. Very neat work."

You had to have extremely precise control and understanding of your magic, and probably also of bones, to manage something like that. On purpose, at least. Tifa recognized the feeling because it was much less hard to do by mistake, or because you ran out of energy or potions before the fix was done.

Greenstick healing, Aerith used to call it. Better than nothing by a long shot, but.

"Ah." Fair winced. Tifa could see he was disappointed by the news that his general had passed up the opportunity to show he could be trustworthy in favor of guaranteeing his power over her, but not really surprised.

Tifa certainly wasn't. It wasn't as if either of them could claim Sephiroth was wrong—in fact, that he bothered to take this precaution showed he was either taking Tifa seriously, or not entirely caught up in his own ego, or both. It was encouraging, as a sign of not being too crazy. It was discouraging, as a sign of his being less likely to make the kinds of overconfident gloating mistakes that had opened him up to losing the first time.

Somewhat belatedly she checked her gear, such as it was. It didn't feel like she'd been stripped while unconscious. Boots were gone. Bag was gone. Someone had fished the Seal out of her bra. She was doubly glad now she'd given Vincent the much more important Fire.

"Who took my materia?"

Fair's expression barely changed. "Sephiroth ordered Cloud to do it." Oh, Planet. "But I stepped in instead and let him off. Sorry about that."

"It's fine." Expecting them to leave her armed because of her decision about where to store her weapon would have been unreasonable.

They could have gotten one of the village women to do it, but they probably weren't sure who was in on her conspiracy. It was sort of a surprise Sephiroth hadn't switched over to operating out of the Manor instead of the inn. Maybe he'd commandeered this whole building.

She wasn't sure what still another unfollowed command would mean for Cloud's undoubtedly precarious future with Shinra, but it wasn't like she really wanted him to have one anyway. And she would much rather Fair had his hands down her shirt than any of the others—the two troopers were unknowns, Cloud would probably be mildly scarred by being coerced into taking liberties, and like hell she would accept Sephiroth touching her, no matter how clinical he was about it.

Fair wasn't clinical at all, but she trusted he'd have extracted the materia efficiently, and not felt the need to build up his ego from the drubbing she'd given him by taking advantage of her helplessness, or anything like that.

Her hands lay slack in her lap. She'd surrendered, but she hadn't necessarily lost. Not yet.

Fair leaned forward just a hair. "Where'd you get the materia?"

No good reason not to answer that, especially considering Shinra's probable suspicion of everyone in Nibelheim at this point. "I bashed a Genesis copy's head into the ground until it passed out, then stripped its gear."

Eyebrows shot up, but not to challenge her truthfulness. "He's been giving 'em materia? Damn, I never even thought to check."

"Didn't they ever cast at you?"

"Yeah, but lots of monsters get spells as special abilities."

Fair didn't follow up this sentence with anything; he'd said it with confidence but then seemed to become uncomfortable with his own logic, and Tifa let it sit there without comment between them for a while.

Studied Fair's face, and the conflict under the skin she still didn't know him enough to read. "Do you think he's a monster?"

"He acts enough like one," Fair said, almost sulkily. "What's the difference?"

"He's not that different from Sephiroth," Tifa pointed out. "He's not even that different from you."

"We aren't monsters!" the words burst out of Fair, young and broken in a way she'd never heard him, and he snatched up his sword, muscles tensing as if to stand, and Tifa went very, very still.

Fair realized in the next second what it meant to a bound prisoner to have a sword waved over her, and let it fall flat beside him on the surface of the mattress, his hand slack over the hilt.

Tifa...knew that questions of responsibility became blurred, a little, when people had Jenova in their heads. She also knew it didn't matter to argue or parse apart the fragments of responsibility in guilt, if you weren't doing anything to make up for what you'd done.

That was why Cloud had never hesitated again, except for the stumbling-point that had been Geostigma, after she'd helped him extract a core of certainty in his own existence from inside the Lifestream. Once he knew who he was.

Because as long as they kept going forward together, he was proving he was not the broken creature Hojo and Sephiroth had tried to make him. And he was taking responsibility for the choices they'd pushed him into, and being strong.

Tifa didn't think he needed to take nearly as much responsibility as he had, because Sephiroth had never really needed his help. At least not the second time, when he had made a choice at all, instead of having control of his limbs taken away from him entirely, in the place where the Temple of the Ancients had stood. Everything after that had just been…some sort of convoluted torture.

Sephiroth could have delivered the Black Materia to himself while they were trekking to Gongaga and losing track of Aerith to begin with, and could have called Meteor even before they'd found their way to the city where Aerith had summoned Holy and died.

Let alone before they crossed the mountains after him and briefly got the Black Materia back.

But that was Cloud. And too much responsibility taken for the world was always more heroic than too little.

And this, here in this inn in Nibelheim…violet blue eyes and immaculately styled dark hair, this was the terribly young man who had smiled in a photograph, and fought Sephiroth to avenge her home, and died under Shinra's bullets protecting Cloud. That was all she'd really known of him a few days ago, even though they'd met and climbed a mountain together once before, and it was almost hard to connect those facts to this Shinra-loyalist boy before her, except that he obviously cared so much.

And was just a little bit afraid of what Shinra had made of him, already.

"You're not," she agreed softly into the smothered silence, meaning just him. He wasn't a monster. The others could make their decisions in their own time.

Fair shook his head, hard, like a dog with water in its ears. "Anyway," he said, taking his hand away from the weapon at his side and linking them across his lap again, "our itinerary. I did call Tseng, while you were out, and he should be here pretty soon, which is why I woke you up."

"Great," said Tifa, who had to admit this was a better reason than interrogation to deny her the chance to finish sleeping off a major healing.

"So now would be a good time to give us the flight plan."

"We'll head east," Tifa said. "And south. Past where the southern spur of the Nibel range turns into the Concaussus. I'll point. Who's coming?"

"You, me, Sephiroth," Fair answered easily. "Cloud, I think mostly cuz the General wants to keep an eye on him. The other two guys will be keeping an eye on the town. We called out to your ex-Turk buddy that we had you and you'd surrendered but he didn't come in, so either he didn't hear us or he doesn't care."

"Did you threaten me? To get him in line?" Tifa asked, more curious than anything.

"…it was more sort of implied."

Tifa nodded. "It would take more than that to get him to take you seriously. Besides. He just met me the day before yesterday. I doubt he's eager to give up his freedom for me."

She honestly didn't know what he would do. The only time she'd seen him react to a hostage situation as-such was that time with Yuffie and Don Corneo—he hadn't cared much, or said he didn't, but they'd all been furious with Yuffie, at the time.

He'd rescued Marlene from the Remnants, but Cloud had already been committed to that operation. Besides, that was Marlene.

On the one hand, it was good to have Vincent free. On the other, it wasn't going to be that much use having Vincent running around on his own near Nibelheim if the rest of them were two hundred miles away on the opposite side of impassable mountains. Or, it might, if he managed to destroy Jenova while they were gone, but she didn't like the thought of leaving him to the Genesis army alone.

And it would be wrong, probably, not to give him the chance to visit Lucrecia. Like with killing Fair a day ago, if she'd known for sure it would work to solve everything she'd do it, but for only a maybe…

"…tell him where we're going. He'll come."

"You haven't told us where we're going."

"East," Tifa reiterated. "Over the mountains. In a helicopter."

"…that's it?"

"He'll know what I mean. If he's still close enough to hear, he'll come."

Or he wouldn't. It seemed unlikely, but she left it to his discretion.

Zack Fair had food for her, which was unusually considerate for Shinra—the last two times they'd taken her prisoner she definitely hadn't been fed, and the second time she'd just come out of a week-long coma and been ravenous.

Of course they hadn't wanted to feed her then, because that might give her strength to fight her way free, and possibly also because if she died on an empty stomach it would be harder for her to vomit on live TV in the late stages of poisoning.

They'd chosen her over Barret to gas to death for aesthetic reasons, after all. She wasn't sure whether that was Rufus' taste or Scarlet's.

The lack of anything to eat had been yet another discourtesy on Rufus' part, either way, heaped on top of the flagrant petty evil of killing her before the eyes of the world, a scapegoat for all Shinra's decisions that had led up to the summoning of Meteor, in hopes it would keep the people cowed and loyal to him in the time remaining.

The condemned were meant to be entitled to a final meal.

But that was then, five years in the future, and this was now. What Fair had gotten her was a thick, meaty stew, loaded with carrots and parsnips cooked down into the broth, still warm though not hot, and she ate carefully, because she'd been on somewhat short commons recently and gone into shock a few hours ago. There was a tall cup of milk, too, which Tifa probably needed even more than protein, between the blood lost and the calcium needed to knit bone even as much as Sephiroth had bothered to do.

The bowl was wooden, and the cup heavy crockery—she probably could break it and get a sharp edge to cut the rope tying her to the bed, if left unsupervised, but it would be much harder to weaponize than glass. Might be able to leave some bruises, if she threw it hard enough.

"Thank you," she said at last, scraping the bowl. This was worth having been woken up sooner than absolutely necessary. She didn't look at Fair as she said it, though. Something in her rebelled against thanking anyone who had her tied to a bed, even for a thing she honestly appreciated.

But she knew Fair wanting to help her was probably the best resource she had right now. It could be like Reeve. He'd chosen them over Shinra for a lot of reasons, some of which Tifa thought stupid, but it never could have happened if he hadn't gotten to know them so well first, and see them as people.

Of course, it was Tifa who was embedded in a Shinra cell now, wasn't it, not the other way around. Superspy Tifa Lockheart, that was her.

"No problem," said Fair. "I got some for both of us at the same time and didn't tell the innkeeper which was which, so unless he wants us both dead it's probably not poisoned."

Tifa looked up from her bowl in astonishment. Mostly at the idea of old man Hilgrid poisoning anybody, even someone involved in smashing up his building, but also at this level of deviousness.

"Don't look like that! I didn't just feed you because of that, it just occurred to me it could help. And I don't know who you actually trust, so I thought you might have been worried too."

Right. Fair was taking seriously the possibility that the entirety of Nibelheim was involved in one or more complicated schemes to mess somehow with Sephiroth. "The…townspeople don't know anything," she said. Didn't like how that had come out. "I mean. They're not involved. Really. It's just me."

"And are you ever going to tell us how you got involved, missy?"

Tifa snorted and rolled her eyes, which gave her good cover for looking away. "Maybe sometime. My dad doesn't know anything either," she added, just in case he didn't think immediate family was included in 'the townspeople.'

"That's pretty obvious."

There was a sardonic burr to that that made Tifa look back around at the SOLDIER. What?

"He kept coming around railing at us for abducting his innocent young daughter in the dead of night. Wouldn't believe you'd run off on your own. Since your really public, uh, fight in the town square earlier he's been out of his mind mad at us. Insisting on seeing proof we didn't murder you, which with that amount of blood I guess is fair."

Tifa winced. "Did you let him see me?"

"No, but we brought in a lady he said he'd trust, the local herbalist."

"Madam Breezebalm?"

"Yeah. So he knows you're not dead. Or he knows you weren't dead an hour and a half ago, anyway."

Tifa was surprised he was telling her all this. Of course she wasn't about to say so. He might think better of it.

"He's been having an amazing number of guests over this evening," Fair continued with patently false cheer. "Luckily your house fronts on the square so we can track comings and goings from here. Sephiroth thinks he's plotting an insurrection."

"We can't have an insurrection," Tifa's voice snapped out, sharp with anger before she had time to reflect on whether it was tactically advisable. "You don't rule us."

Fair blinked at her in evident astonishment.

"This isn't Midgar," Tifa pushed on, since having started she might as well carry the point to its end. "Shinra doesn't own anything here, except the reactor. And the manor building. You don't have any authority in Nibelheim."

Of course, the richest people in town had long had the implicit right to push everyone else around and make decisions about the direction of the town as a whole, so Rufus' maternal grandmother's family had been leading citizens once and had a lot of effective authority, but that wasn't an official position heritable through a bloodline, and owning land here didn't make the Shinras into Nibelheimers.

What they did have was the sort of authority that came out of the barrel of a gun. And the sort at the bottom of a wallet. That was enough, for most purposes, in most parts of the Planet, and while Nibelheimers were individually stubborn they hadn't had a lot of spirit as a community for a long time.

But still. Shinra had power here, like they did everywhere. But no legitimate authority.

"Uh…fine, then," said Fair, still seeming really taken aback by this really pretty basic political concept. "Sephiroth thinks he's planning an attack."

Tifa sagged a little, wishing the rope at her ankle had the slack to let her lean against the wall at the head of the bed. "Planet I hope not."

"Well I mean, if all Nibelheimers are as surprising as you…"

Tifa didn't bother to look less annoyed than she was. "I told you they aren't. And anyway, do you really think even fifty of me could do anything against Sephiroth?"

There'd be a dignity to dying charging at him to rescue a captured damsel that her people hadn't gotten the first time around, but dead was still dead, and dead for her sake would cut her to the bone.

(She'd given herself up to protect the town. Not that she'd had much choice, but Sephiroth had agreed. They couldn't get out of here fast enough to suit her.)

Fair shrugged. "I mean, you got me pretty good."

"That was Limit Break." That wasn't giving anything away he didn't already know. She wasn't going to bring up how long and how much damage it took to build up to a fourth-level Limit. He was probably already taking that into account.

"Well, enough of those, then sure. I hear they grow them tough in these little mountain towns."

The way he said it made a smile pull at Tifa's mouth, even in spite of her certain knowledge that if all of Nibelheim tried to fight Sephiroth they'd mostly be cut down before they even had the chance to try for their Limits. "Cloud's pretty special," she agreed.

"Special like Aerith?"

Something a little sharp had entered his voice, not angry but keen, and this was…actually a really smooth interrogation she was undergoing, wasn't it. "I told you, you should talk to her. But no. Not special like Aerith. Just…like Cloud."

Fair drew in a breath, and let it out. "It wasn't easy, you know," he said quietly. "Convincing him to trick you like that."

Tifa narrowed her eyes. "You mean it wasn't easy because he didn't want to, or because you didn't want to?"

"Well, I meant because of him, but I guess…I did feel bad." His eyes had dropped away, and the keenness was gone. Good. She could work with shame.

"How did you convince him?"

"Seph and me double-teamed him. Duty, protecting the town, if we got you in custody we wouldn't need to fight you again so you'd be safe, we just wanted you to stay put and talk to us. I told him you were stressing Seph out so bad with all this hinting I didn't know how much longer he could take it. Sephiroth said getting you into custody before we had any official orders about you would put you in less danger.

"I dunno what finally made the difference. Cloud got me to promise I wouldn't let Hojo get his hands on you if he helped, though, so if you're still worried about that you can stop."

Sephiroth had told Cloud he only wanted to talk to her, and Cloud had trusted that.

She admitted she considered Fair the more trustworthy of the pair of Firsts by some way, but he was Shinra first and foremost.

"If you would ever hand over a person to Hojo, I don't trust you not to do it just because you made a promise," she informed him.

Fair looked honestly hurt, but mostly offended. "Hey. Even if you don't think so, I have my honor as a SOLDIER."

"As a SOLDIER," Tifa repeated. Didn't put a derisive twist in it, but really? SOLDIER was something Shinra had made, something they bestowed. He couldn't use SOLDIER as a protective layer between himself and the things he did and facilitated as Shinra employee.

"Yes. As SOLDIER." He seemed to be daring her to make something of it, but…she knew he didn't have any certainty left to destroy. He was afraid he was a monster, and that…well. She respected that more than Genesis' gleeful sublimation of himself into that identity. Fair was conflicted, halting. Troubled. Making excuses, trying to find a way to live with himself, within what Shinra made of its people.

All of that was annoying, but it was better than not caring at all, the way someone like Reno or Scarlet or Rufus or Hojo did, or than deciding that everything was so corrupt it should burn.

(She and Barret and the others could have hurt Shinra a lot worse, if they'd ever been willing to stop caring about the people caught in the middle, and throw themselves into their hate with total purity of purpose. But Tifa knew what that looked like, that decision, that purity. That looked like Sephiroth, walking away from humanity through the embers of her home town.)

So instead of running the question of Fair's honor down, and gnawing it to the bone, she just said, "Would you give me to Hojo? If you hadn't promised Cloud?"

The young man sighed, his broad shoulders sagging slightly. "Not…now."

Tifa decided that was good enough. If she blamed people for who they used to be, she'd have no friends and few customers.

"You're sixteen," Fair announced, inanely, in the direction of the back wall rather than to her face. "Like Cloud. We checked." Tifa shrugged. All evidence would in fact agree that she was sixteen. "Did someone experiment on you?" He asked it unhappily, but he looked toward her to ask, didn't let his eyes fall away in discomfort.

Tifa blinked.

"What you did on top of the mountain," Fair continued, eyes excessively deep blue and more urgent than his husky voice. "It wasn't normal. You've got connections and history with Shinra no one knows about. Last person Seph met who was stronger than she should have been had been enhanced by AVALANCHE. She was better than you," he added, not apparently intending to offend. "They meant her to fight Sephiroth."

AVALANCHE had made its own super soldiers? At least one that had impressed Sephiroth with her strength? Tifa knew a bit about the schism that had happened before her time, that had opened AVALANCHE up to Shinra attack and left only sad stubborn cells like hers and Barret's operation, but she'd just known it had been disagreements about ethics, which were pretty inevitable in their line of work.

"…no," she said, a little too slowly to be entirely believable. "Some people I care about were…by Shinra, but. Not me."

It wasn't impossible, what she'd done, fighting him. It wasn't even entirely absurd. People didn't always unlock their Limits at the same speed as the rest of their strength. You had to survive a lot of pain to get there, and you had to win a lot of fights, and you had to use your Limits, to break through them and reach new ones.

But those qualifications didn't have to happen all at once. A kid could get beaten up by his parents every day and then sneak off and hunt normal frogs with a pocket knife each evening, and break through two limits in a matter of weeks, if he was determined enough.

To get your final Limit by Tifa's apparent age you would have to have either the fantastically bad luck to be constantly facing mortal peril throughout childhood matched with the fantastically good luck to repeatedly survive it, and locate your key artifact easily. Or else be an absolute lunatic with no regard for your own wellbeing.

Tifa didn't see why Fair was having trouble accepting the latter scenario as fact, considering her behavior since he'd met her. Maybe it was her entirely sane tendency to repeatedly run away?

Maybe he intuited that her base strength should be higher, if she'd been throwing herself into fights with the regularity her Limit and skill level suggested. This guy wasn't actually stupid, Tifa reminded herself. Or maybe he was kind of stupid, but made up for it with good instincts.

"You sure?" he asked quietly.

She stared down into her lap. Her hands had twisted together. "I'm sure. There are…a lot of things. But that's not it." It would be easier, maybe, to let him believe that. He'd stop digging. At least for now. But she couldn't. She couldn't claim that suffering for herself, it was too immense a thing in the lives of too many people she respected, to use as just…a shield for her own intentions.

Fair let that rest in silence. It might be an expectant silence, but if so it wasn't working on her. "Okay," he said at last. "Do you…"

The doorknob turned, and Tifa's eyes shot over Fair's shoulder to it as it opened on—Sephiroth, PHS in hand.

"Time, Zack."

A/N: There was no really good breaking point, they just kept talking. Love you guys, and Zack and Tifa. ^-^